Only 12 trucks delivered food, water in North Gaza Governorate since October: Oxfam

Just 12 trucks distributed food and water in northern Gaza in two-and-a-half months, aid group Oxfam said on Sunday, raising the alarm over the worsening humanitarian situation in the besieged Palestinian territory.

The Israeli authorities rejected the report, saying it was "deliberately and inaccurately" ignoring their humanitarian efforts.

"Of the meager 34 trucks of food and water given permission to enter the North Gaza Governorate over the last 2.5 months, deliberate delays and systematic obstructions by the Israeli military meant that just 12 managed to distribute aid to starving Palestinian civilians," Oxfam said in a statement, in a count that included deliveries through Saturday.

"For three of these, once the food and water had been delivered to the school where people were sheltering, it was then cleared and shelled within hours," Oxfam added.

Israel, which has tightly controlled aid entering the Hamas-ruled territory since the outbreak of the war, often blames what it says is the inability of relief organizations to handle and distribute large quantities of aid.

COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry body coordinating Palestinian civilian affairs, slammed the Oxfam report.

"The Oxfam report deliberately and inaccurately ignores the extensive humanitarian efforts made by Israel in the northern Gaza Strip," COGAT told AFP.

"Since October, over 2,100 aid trucks have entered the northern Gaza Strip," it said, insisting that specific shipments "including food, water, and medical supplies" had been dispatched to northern Gaza areas of Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia and Jabalia.

In a report focused on water, New York-based Human Rights Watch on Thursday detailed what it called deliberate efforts by Israeli authorities "of a systematic nature" to deprive Gazans of water, which had "likely caused thousands of deaths... and will likely continue to cause deaths."

They were the latest in a series of accusations levelled against Israel — and denied by the country — during its 14-month war against Palestinian Hamas militants.

The Gaza war was sparked by Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which left 1,208 people dead, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Since then, Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed at least 45,317 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory's health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.